1991 Mustang LX - The Efficiency Expert

It’s nice to be surprised. Take another look at that green Fox-body Mustang. When the car fires up in the pits and heads to staging, there’s nothing that would make you take notice. It’s quiet, it’s flat. Good burnout, but that doesn’t mean much. When the lights come down, there’s no sound, but is that air under the front tires? A lot of air? Is that car really moving that fast? Yes—8.45 at 164 mph. The driver makes a few passes, packs up the trunk, and then heads out on the road, because this is a street car, and you just met Randy Seward, Internet legend.

Randy made his mark in cyberspace back in March 2012, when he decided to drive his ’91 Mustang LX from Alamogordo, New Mexico, to Bradenton, Florida, for the NMRA Spring Break Shootout. A simple post on racing forum YellowBullet.com became a viral support network, as armchair crew chiefs around the country tuned in to see how Randy was faring on his journey east. Posts went up offering places to stay, garages to borrow, and replacement parts. As it turned out, Randy needed very little. He drove until he was tired, then parked the car and curled up in a sleeping bag next to its 295/65-15 Mickey Thompsons. He made it to Florida, dyno-tuned the car, and headed to the track. Then he won the race, and the Internet.

That wasn’t enough driving for one year, so Randy joined us for HOT ROD Drag Week™ 2012, where his foxy sleeper caught our attention. We rode with Randy for a day, and found that under the coffee cups and “lived-in” clutter—hey, he was actually living in it—there’s some innovative and sophisticated engineering, ensuring the Mustang goes quick on the track and goes the distance on the street.

“The most surprising thing about the New Mexico to Florida trip wasn’t that I made it—it was that the forums were so positive about the trip. I’m amazed and humbled.” - Randy Seward

“My idea of a perfect trip is when nothing goes wrong, but I knew that no matter what happened, I could fix it,” Randy says about the mindset that first set him out across the country in an 8-second car. “It was more about the challenge than the race.”

Randy likes a challenge. He was in the Air Force and later flew ultralight planes for the fun of it. “I learned a lot about listening to the machine in those planes,” he explains. “You can land them with no power, but not if you’re caught off-guard.” These days, he’s a mechanical engineer working a military contract as an efficiency expert in Tennessee, and, of course, perfecting the art of the fast street car.

4/7There are two brains behind the Mustang’s quick times; one is Randy’s, and the other is a stand-alone Sport 2000 EFI system from Haltech Engine Management. Not only can the system control fuel and ignition, but it also ofers options such as fuel pumps, turbo wastegates, and datalogging.

This love of quick cars goes back to the early ’70s, when he raced a two-barrel, Cleveland-powered Cougar, then a ’70 Mach 1 with a 428, then a 302 Pinto, then a big-block Cougar. Are you sensing a Blue Oval theme here? By the early ’90s, Randy was interested in turbocharging and decided that the popular, affordable Fox-body platform was the car to start with, so he set to work on an ’85 coupe. Turbocharging was much less refined back then, and Randy had to learn a lot about tuning with distributor mods and exhaust-gas-temperature readings.

That first Fox met a sad end when it was stolen in late 1994. Randy was crushed and didn’t even think about cars again until 2007, when an ad for a four-cylinder Calypso Green ’91 coupe caught his eye. “My plan was to make it a 9-second street car,” Randy tells us. “I didn’t, and still don’t, own a trailer, so the car had to make it everywhere on its own.”

5/7We rode several hundred miles in the passenger seat, displacing Randy’s cofee mug. “The race seats are the real test,” Randy says. “I’ll drive 4,000 miles, and when I get out of the car, it feels like it says Kirkey across my back.” We made it about 112 miles before squirming in lumbarsupportless misery.

Knowing that a sub-10-second street car needs to be a hardy thing, Randy went all aftermarket with the engine, starting with a Dart block and making a 365-incher using Prime One crank and rods, CP forged pistons, and a Comp Cams solid roller rocking 0.655/0.647 lift and 285/279 advertised duration, and topping it with Trick Flow heads and a very slick EFI system on an Edelbrock RPM II intake. The twin Garrett turbochargers came later, after months of perfecting the car under naturally aspirated conditions. Once he felt the chassis and engine were dialed in, Randy made a paper template of the exhaust tubing and worked with a welder at TRZ Motorsports in Kissemmee, Florida (TRZmotorsports.com) to complete the setup. “It took 20 trips and two months, but the welding is flawless,” Randy says. The first pass with the turbos and 5 pounds of boost netted Randy an 11.23 at 123 mph and a firm suggestion from the track owner that he not run again until the car had a proper ’cage. There are few better feelings than being kicked out for going too fast. Randy caged the car and started steadily getting faster. By the time we hitched a ride, Randy was deep in the 8-second range.

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The first thing you notice when you clamber over the crossbar on the 10-point ’cage and into the gray, tweedy Kirkey seats is that those are the only two elements that really scream “race car.” The dash looks pretty stock, aside from a large air/fuel gauge behind the steering wheel and a scattering of toggle switches beneath a charging cell phone on the console. “What do those do?” we asked, and 20 minutes of complicated explanations later, we learned that one toggles between transbrake and line-lock (both engaged by the right-side cruise-control button on the steering wheel), one switches the left-side pressure gauge from reading engine oil pressure to reading transmission cooler-line pressure, and one activates the datalogger and variable-stall function. Oh, and the first one also resets the MSD 7531 datalogger. You got all that?

“It’s kinda scary when you get under the panel,” says Randy in the understatement of the year. “There are a lot of wires under there.”

Toggle switches, dual-purpose gauges, and repurposed steering-wheel buttons aren’t the only hidden controls in the Fox body. The whole thing is a bit of an evil genius’ workstation. The foglight button triggers overdrive. The “max air” knob is a manual override for the electric fans. We’re pretty sure there’s at least one button that launches knife blades from the center of the 15-inch Weld Draglite 90s, and does that cable by the console go back to some sort of “escape in a cloud of smoke” cannon in the rear? Oh no, wait—that’s for the parachute.

“All I did before Drag Week™ was change oil and plugs. I’m not going to cater to any car like it’s a showpiece.” - Randy Seward

Maybe he ran out of stock control knobs—or hands to work them—but several of the Mustang’s coolest features are fully automated, like the dual fuel system that allows Randy to run 93- or even 87-octane on the street and automatically kicks in when the boost goes over 5 pounds so at least 88 percent of the fuel hitting the cylinders is race gas. Not only does this make Randy’s street driving economical, but it also maximizes the use of his C16 on the track. “With this setup,” Randy says, “the car typically uses only 1 gallon or so per two to three runs.”

On the street, running minimal boost and overdrive, we averaged nearly 20 mpg. Nobody even glanced our way as we idled smoothly through Drag Week’s™ one-traffic-light towns and past the oil slicks and broken U-joints of less lucky competitors. Occasional traffic jams kept Randy busy with the manual-valvebody shifter, and various under-car components barked and chattered over potholes and around corners, but Randy never faltered. “This isn’t hard,” he says. “It’s only hard to be patient on the street, to wait for the race.” Hot Rod

7/7

01] Toggle switches reset the data logger and switch the gauge readings. 02] The Variable Control Stall function is also toggle-activated. VCS temporarily lowers pressure going to the torque convertor to allow higher revs and a faster turbo spool-up and harder launch. Randy regularly sees 60-foot times of 1.27, and that’s with conservative setups due to a lack of wheelie bars. 03] Randy is pleased about the advances made in turbo technology but says he still uses a pyrometer to measure EGT throughout a run. “Air/fuel and EGT monitor similar things,” Randy tells us during the drive. “But A/F is a complicated measurement, and if in doubt, I trust the EGT readings; if the EGT is high, the engine is probably lean, no matter what the A/F says.” 04] There’s no heater in the car, so the “max air” cool knob is a manual overdrive for the electric fans. 05] The Mustang uses an FB Transmissions AOD with overdrive. It has a manual valvebody, but Randy uses the stock Fox shifter. “I do miss a shift now and then,” he admits. “But I tried a ratcheting shifter and hated it.” 06] The foglight paddle on the left of the dashboard activates the electric overdrive. 07] The cruise-control of button controls the transbrake and the line-lock.

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